Herman Melville
Moby-Dick, greatest American novel
Most quoted
"What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; by all the world, as if some invisible tyrant were trying to drive me to a certain spot, and I, for all my resistance, could not choose but go?"
— from Moby Dick, 1851
"To have been Belshazzar, King of Babylon; and to have been Belshazzar, not haughtily but courteously, therein certainly must have been some touch of mundane grandeur. But to have been young Belshazzar, and not to have been haughty, but to have been a mere good-natured, joking boy, therein must have been a still more fine and subtile touch of earthly divineness."
— from Pierre, 1852
"Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself?"
— from Moby Dick, 1851
All quotes by Herman Melville (234)
The sea is a mirror of the soul.
To be great is to be misunderstood.
All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes to pawing over the tarnished relics of his memory, like a burial-vault digger among coffins.
Ahab's quenchless feud seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of that murderous monster against whom he warred, and the vindictive cry of Ahab did not seem to me so much the ravings of a madman, as the righteous indignation of an insulted man.
The world's a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.
Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself?
To be true to the game, you must be true to the game's rules.
For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young man, all who have died heroically have died in a sort of ecstasy of self-surrender, which, if you will, is a sort of madness.
I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.
A man thinks not of a thousand pleasures that he has, but of one pain that he has not.
The sea is the only place where I am truly free.
What is it, that in the Albino whale, so peculiarly strikes the imagination of man? Not only his preternatural whiteness, but also the bodily awe he strikes in the hearts of the most fearless.
The world is a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.
All profound things, and emotions of things, are preceded and attended by silence.
The sea is a devil, and a good God, and a mother, and a monster.
The world is a wolf, and man is a sheep.
He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great.
We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.
All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks.
Contemporaries of Herman Melville
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Herman Melville (1819–1891).